How Green is Cork Flooring?
Cork is a generally green material. The raw material is actually the bark from the cork oak, harvested every nine years (after the cork oak gets to be about 25 years old); each cork oak tree lives for about 200 years, so each tree can be successfully harvested for cork almost 20 times, though the first two harvests tend to produce lower-quality cork. So it scores highly for renewability. Cork oak trees grow almost exclusively in the Mediterranean—Portugal produces more cork than any other country—so for those of us in North America, there can be some significant transportation—and related carbon emissions—required to get the cork from there to here. When it comes time to put it in, as with other sheeted flooring options, beware formaldehyde and other off-gassing chemicals in adhesives.
